Cataloging Futures

New David Bade paper: Irresponsible Librarianship

Nathan Rinne was kind enough to point out that David Bade has a new paper out: Irresponsible Librarianship: a critique of the report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control and thoughts on how to proceed.

This paper discusses the three guiding principles of the report of the LC Working Group and discusses some of the contradictions and problems with the recommendations. The Report focuses entirely on technical systems and does not deal at all with problems of human communication. The Report urges reuse of metadata but legacy data is a continuing problem rather than a solution. The report urges cooperation but offers a model of exploitation and reliance. The report assumes that all differences in information creation and use will be no problem for if we demand that everyone accept our (?) standards we can accept metadata as is. The report denies that service to sophisticated users is of value to the larger community. The paper closes with remarks on the future of music librarianship.

David Bade's new book

One of the voice I've been listening to in the future of cataloging debate is David Bade. So, I was glad to know that David's new book, Responsible Librarianship: Library Policies for Unreliable Systems, has just been published. Also, you'll be interested to know that Thomas Mann wrote the foreword.

The three papers in this volume were written in the wake of a single policy decision at the Library of Congress: the decision to cease the practice of distinguishing and collating series through the use of distinctive headings maintained in an authority file. These papers examine library policies and organizational structures in light of the literature of ergonomics, high reliability organizations, joint cognitive systems and integrational linguistics. Bade argues that many policies and structures have been designed and implemented on the basis of assumptions about technical possibilities, ignoring entirely the political dimensions of local determination of goals and purposes as well as the lessons from ergonomics, such as the recognition that people are the primary agents of reliability in all technical systems. Looking at various policies for metadata creation and the results of those policies forces the question: is there a responsible human being behind the library web site and catalog, or have we abandoned the responsibilities of thinking and judgment in favor of procedures, algorithms and machines?

Via Library Juice